Bill Reynolds: We continue to watch the NFL, regardless of the price

This is not the best of time for football, even in the afterglow of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the country.

This is not the best of time for football, even in the afterglow of Sunday’s Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the country.

You almost can’t get through a week these days without some ex-player coming forward with his concussion issues. And these have been high profile players, some of the biggest names in the game’s history. From Junior Seau to Tony Dorsett to Brett Favre, the stories always seem to have many of the same themes, a laundry list of headaches, depression, memory loss, dementia, and various cognitive issues.

On Sunday it was Joe Namath, once arguably the biggest name in the game, the man who took part in the ceremonial coin toss on Sunday night. Certainly he was the biggest name in the game back there in January 1969, when he led his upstart New York Jets of the old AFL to an upset win over the vaunted Baltimore Colts of the NFL, the game that changed everything, one of the most significant games in football history.

He said on Sunday that he has health problems, which he believes are the result of concussions suffered while playing professional football.

“None of the body was designed to play football,” he said.

This has become the elephant in the room, the thing no one really wants to talk about. We all love to watch football, myself included. Watching the NFL is the new national pastime, long ago surpassing baseball as the country’s most favorite sport. The TV numbers tell us that. The buzz tells us that. Everything tells us that.

But how long are we going to continue to watch as the evidence keeps rolling in that says that too many of the guy playing it are going to one day pay a big price for doing so?

On Jan. 24 there was a story in the New York Times by Steve Almond, which asked the question, “Is it Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?”

Almond began his argument by saying that in the summer of 1978 he was 11 years and a devout Oakland Raiders fan when he watched the Raiders’ Jack Tatum tackle the Pats’ Darryl Stingley, a hit that made Stingley a quadriplegic. He remembers thinking at the time that surely the game of football would be outlawed.

But “the NFL juggernaut rolled on, solidifying its place atop America’s Athletic Industrial Complex,” he wrote, “and I kept right on watching, often devoting entire Sunday afternoons to football in my bachelor years.”

He writes that he still loves football, but “can no longer indulge these pleasures without feeling complicit.”

So is Almond just a voice crying out in the wilderness, or is he at the beginning of something?

I don’t profess to know the answer.

I grew up with football, whether it was going to Brown games as a kid, or playing sandlot football, or playing two years in junior high school. I spent too much of my life watching the NFL on Sunday afternoons, long before I ever became a sports writer. And no doubt will continue to do so, regardless of my job.

But there’s no doubt that I watch it differently these days. The big hit? The bone-crunching tackle? Now there’s a part of me that almost cringes at the sight of them, as if they have become complicated in ways they never really were before.

What does this mean?

I’m not sure.

But there’s no question that I can no longer watch football as simplistically as I once did. Now there is too much back story, too much information that gets in the way, too many complications that never seemed to be there before, at least not as emphatically as they are now.

Maybe it’s this simple: the elephant in the room is getting harder to ignore. Hardly a week goes by when another ex-player is not in the news talking about his cognitive issues. This week it’s Namath. Are we simply just supposed to ignore them all, as if the dangers they’re talking about are merely the cost of doing business, the collateral damage as it were, while we lie on our couches and watch the games?

Has this become the new price tag for being a fan?

That’s the new question, and it’s not an easy one.

And, yes, the players are old enough to know the game’s realities. Yes, the men who run the game are supposed to make it as safe as it can possibly be. But there are no easy answers here. Here is the unquestioned most popular sport in the country and there are too many of the game’s former great players coming out with horror stories about the steep price many are now paying for all the cheers.

What are we supposed to make of this?

Are we just supposed to keep watching and pretend the other issues don’t exist, as if these players accept the obvious risks that come with the game and it’s not out concern?

These are the questions that now hover over the NFL.

They are important questions that go right to the core of the game’s future.

Ones that are far more important than who won the Super Bowl.

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